Description

Jerome Lewis:

"This characterisation is based on
an analytical distinction between an
‘immediate-return’ hunter-gatherer
economy and agricultural, herding or
capitalist ‘delayed-return’ economies
that is helpful for understanding the
differences in approach to resource
management and the environment.

In delayed-return societies work is
invested over extended periods of
time before a yield is produced or
consumed. This delay between labour
investment and consumption results in
political inequality because it becomes
necessary to establish hierarchical
structures of authority to distribute
work, yields and control vital assets as
labour matures into a yield. The
majority of contemporary human
societies are based upon delayed-return
economies. Efforts by communist states
to develop more egalitarian structures
inevitably yielded to these fundamental
forces, reasserting new types of
hierarchies and inequalities to manage
the delay between labour and yield.

‘Immediate-return’ hunter-gatherers
such as the Yaka are strongly orientated
to the present. People like to obtain a
direct and immediate return for their
labour – eating most of their
production on the day they obtain it, as
hunters, gatherers and sometimes as
day labourers paid in food. They value
consumption over accumulation and
will share their food with all present on
the day they acquire it. Without the
authority and power derived from the
ability to withhold vital resources,
hierarchy has great difficulty
establishing itself. Thus societies whose
economies are based on immediate returns
tend to be egalitarian societies."
(http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/new/Journal_files/journal_02.pdf)

Discussion

James Woodburn:

"In a number of recent papers (Woodburn 1978; 1979; 1980), I have sought to
classify hunting and gathering societies-that is societies in which people
obtain their food from wild products by hunting wild animals, by fishing and
by gathering wild roots, fruits and the honey of wild bees2-into two major
categories, those with immediate-return systems and those with delayedreturn
systems.

Immediate-return systems have the following basic characteristics. People
obtain a direct and immediate return from their labour. They go out hunting or
gathering and eat the food obtained the same day or casually over the days that
follow. Food is neither elaborately processed nor stored. They use relatively
simple, portable, utilitarian, easily acquired, replaceable tools and weapons
made with real skill but not involving a great deal of labour.

...

The characteristics of these immediate-return systems I have spelt out in
some detail elsewhere. Here all I intend is an outline sufficient to provide a
background for my discussion of how these societies promote equality. The
social organisation of these societies has the following basic characteristics:

(I) Social groupings are flexible and constantly changing in composition.

(2)Individuals have a choice of whom they associate with in residence, in the
food quest, in trade and exchange, in ritual contexts.

(3) People are not dependent on spec$c other people for access to basic
requirements.

(4) Relationships between people, whether relationships of kinship or other
relationships, stress sharing and mutuality but do not involve long-term
binding commitments and dependencies of the sort that are so familiar in
delayed-return systems.

...

Delayed-return systems, in contrast, have the following characteristics.
People hold rights over valued assets of some sort, which either represent a
yield, a return for labour applied over time or, if not, are held and managed in a
way which resembles and has similar social implications to delayed yields on
labour.

In delayed-return hunting and gathering systems these assets are of four
main types, which may occur separately but are more commonly found in
combination with one another and are mutually reinforcing:

(I) Valuable technical facilities used in production: boats, nets, artificial
weirs, stockades, pit-traps, beehives and other such artefacts which are a

product of considerable labour and from which a food yield is obtained
gradually over a period of months or years.

(2) Processed and stored food or materials usually in fixed dwellings.

(3) Wild products which have themselves been improved or increased by
human labour: wild herds which are culled selectively, wild food-producing
plants which have been tended and so on.

(4) Assets in the form of rights held by men over their female kin who are
then bestowed in marriage on other men.

In principle all farming systems, unless based on wage or slave labour, must be
delayed-return for those doing the work, since the yield on the labour put into
crop-growing or herding domestic animals is only obtained months or years
later. Of course in all delayed-return systems there is some immediate-return
activity, but it is usually rather restricted and may be treated as low-status
activity. Among hunting and gathering societies, the available information
suggests that both immediate-return systems and delayed-return systems are
common. Most are surprisingly easily classified into one or the other category,
but there are some which cause difficulties, as is inevitable with any simple
binary distinction.

Delayed-return systems in all their variety (for almost all human societies are
of this type) have basic implications for social relationships and social groupings:

they depend for their effective operation on a set of ordered, differentiated,
jurally-defined relationships through which crucial goods and services
are transmitted. They imply binding commitments and dependencies between
people. For an individual to secure the yield from his labour or to manage his
assets, he depends on others. The farmer, for example, will almost invariably
pool his labour with others-at least with a spouse and usually during the
labour peaks of the agricultural cycle with several others-but, equally
important, he depends on others for the protection of his growing crops, of his
use rights to the land on which they are growing and of the yield when he
obtains and stores it. While it would, in principle, be possible to imagine
situations in which individuals on their own, invested substantial amounts of
labour over time on their own, protected the asset in which the labour was
invested on their own, and then secured and managed the yields on their own, in
practice this seems almost never to occur."
(http://libcom.org/files/EGALITARIAN%20SOCIETIES%20-%20James%20Woodburn.pdf)

The Egalitarian practices of immediate return societies

James Woodburn:

"What is perhaps surprising is that these societies systematically eliminate
distinctions-other than those between the sexes-of wealth, of power and of
status. There is here no disconnection between wealth, power and status, no
tolerance of inequalities in one of these dimensions any more than in the others.
I have exempted relations between men and women from this sweeping
assertion. In fact formal relationships between men and women are quite
variable in these societies, although in all of them women have far more
independence than is usual in delayed-return systems. But since I have talked
specifically about male-female relations (1978), I have decided to leave them out
of the discussion today. In the present article, all the general statements I make
about relationships should be taken unless otherwise stated as referring only to
adult males.

Let us now see how these systems operate in practice.

Mobility and flexibility

In all these six societies nomadism is fundamental. There
are no fixed dwellings, fixed base camps, fixed stores, fixed hunting or fishing
apparatus-such as stockades or weirs-or fixed ritual sites to constrain
movements. People live in small camp units containing usually a dozen or two
people and moving frequently.

These small nomadic camp units are associated with particular areas, usually
described in the literature as territories, large enough to provide for subsistence
requirements during the annual cycle. Each area at any one time will usually
contain one or more camps: camp size and the number of camps vary
seasonally. In some cases rights are asserted over its natural resources by the
people most closely associated with the area. There is variation between these
societies in the extent to which such rights are asserted, but what seems clear is
that in every case individuals have full rights of access to camps in several of
these areas and there is no question of tightly defined groups monopolising the
resources of their areas and excluding outsiders. People can and do move from
one camp to another and from one area to another, either temporarily or
permanently and without economic penalty. Lee describes how the composition
of !Kung camps which usually contain between ten and thirty
individuals changes from day to day. Intercamp visiting is, he says, the main
source of this fluctuation, but each year about 13 per cent. of the population
makes a permanent residential shift from one camp to another. Another 35 per
cent. divides its period of residence equally among two or three different camps
which may or may not be within the same area (1979: 54).

Access to means of coercion

Another important factor in this context is the access
which all males have to weapons among the !Kung, Hadza, Mbuti and Batek.
Hunting weapons are lethal not just for game animals but also for people.

There are serious dangers in antagonising someone: he might choose simply to
move away but if he feels a strong sense of grievance that his rights have been
encroached upon he could respond with violence. Lee gives a number of
important case histories of !Kung murders showing clearly that there are
contexts in which individuals are prepared to use their poisoned arrows (1979:
370-400). Hadza recognise not just the danger of open public violence, where
at least retaliation may be possible, but also the hazard of being shot when
asleep in camp at night or being ambushed when out hunting alone in the bush
(Woodburn 1979: 2 ~ 2 ) Effective protection against ambush is impossible.

Access to food and other resources

I have already discussed how, within the general
pattern of nomadic movement, individuals are able to avoid constraint by their
freedom to detach themselves from others at a moment's notice without
economic or other penalty. But let us now look more closely at the rights
which individuals enjoy without which such action would not be practicable.
What are an individual's entitlements to food and other resources and how are
these entitlements taken up?

In all these societies individuals have direct access, limited by the division of
labour between the sexes, to the ungarnered resources of their country. Whatever
the system of territorial rights, in practice in their own areas and in other
areas with which they have ties, people have free and equal access to wild foods
and water; to all the various raw materials they need for making shelters, tools,
weapons and ornaments; to whatever wild resources they use, processed or
unprocessed, for trade.

Among the !Kung each area and its resources are used both by a core of men
and women with long-standing associations with the area, who identify with it
rather than with other areas, and by a wide range of other people who have
come from other areas, some temporarily and some more permanently, and
who are in most cases linked to one or more of the core members or other
residents by a kinship or affinal tie (Marshall 1976; Lee 1979). Anyone with
such a link who comes to live with the people of the area cannot, in practice, be
refused full access to its resources provided that he or she observes certain
minimal rules of politeness. As Marshall explains, newcomers share equally
while they live there. No core member or anyone else has the right to withhold
resources from the newcomer or to take a larger share (1976: 189).

Among the !Kung, this relative freedom of access operates in spite of the fact
that people long associated with an area claim to be 'owners' (k"ausi) of it and in
particular of its plant and water resources. The !Kung notion of 'ownership' is
clearly a broad one and seems here to mean association with, involvement in,
identification with the area rather than narrow possession of it.

Sharing

The genuine equality of opportunity that individuals enjoy in their
access to resources, limited only by the division of labour between the sexes,
does not, of course, ensure equality of yield. The quantities of all the various
items which individuals obtain, either on their own or jointly with other
people, vary greatly depending on skill, on luck, on persistence, on capacity to
work and on other factors. It is at this point that the most crucial controls on
the development of inequality come into action.

The principal occasions in which individuals in these societies are brought
into association with valued assets which could be accumulated or distributed
to build status are when large game animals are killed. And it is then that the
most elaborate formal rules dissociating the hunter from his kill and denying
him the privileges of ownership are brought to bear. Levelling mechanisms
come into operation precisely at the point where the potential for the
development of inequalities of wealth, power and prestige is greatest. Among
the Hadza and the !Kung hunting success among adult men seems to be very
variable. A high proportion of animals are killed by a small proportion of men
(Lee 1979: 242-4). Techniques for drying meat and converting it into relatively
lightweight stores of biltong are known. Yet successful individual hunters are
specifically denied the opportunity to make effective use of their kills to build
wealth and prestige or to attract dependents. Lee has reported how !Kung are
expected to be self-deprecating about their hunting successes; boasting is met
with scorn (1979: 243-6). Turnbull (1966: 183) tells us that 'some [Mbuti] men,
because of exceptional hunting skill, may come to resent it when their views
are disregarded, but if they try to force those views they are very promptly
subjected to ridicule'. A Hadza returning to camp having shot a large animal is
expected to exercise restraint. He sits down quietly with the other men and
allows the blood on his arrow shaft to speak for him.

Sanctions on the accumulation of personal possessions

Clothing, tools, weapons,
smoking pipes, bead ornaments and other similar objects are personally held
and owned. At least in the case of the three African societies, they are in general
relatively simple objects, made with skill but not elaborately styled or decorated
and not vested with any special significance. They can be made or obtained
without great difficulty. Rules of inheritance are flexible and no-one depends
on receiving such objects either by inheritance or by formal transmission from
close kin of the previous generation during their lifetime.

Everywhere we find that there are sanctions against accumulation. This
cannot be explained, as so many writers have mistakenly suggested, simply in
practical terms: nomadic peoples who have to carry everything they possess are
concerned that their possessions should be readily portable so that they can be
carried with ease when the time comes to move camp, but sanctions against
accumulation go far beyond meeting this requirement and apply even to the
lightest objects such as beads, arrowheads or supplies of arrow poison.

The transmission of possessions between people

Hadza use a distinctive method
for transmitting such personally owned objects between people which has
profound consequences for their relationships. In any large camp men spend
most of their time gambling with one another, far more time than is spent
obtaining food. They gamble mainly for metal-headed hunting arrows, both
poisoned and non-poisoned, but are also able to stake knives, axes, beads,
smoking pipes, cloth and even occasionally a container of honey which can be
used in trade. A few personally-owned objects cannot be staked, because,
Hadza say, they are not sufficiently valuable. These are a man's hunting bow,
his non-poisoned arrows without metal heads used for hunting birds and small
animals, and his leather bag used for carrying his pipes and tobacco, arrowheads
and other odds and ends. These objects excluded from gambling share two
characteristics: first, they maintain a man's capacity to feed and protect himself
and secondly, they are made from materials available in every part of the
country.

Leadership and decision-making

In these societies there are either no leaders at all or
leaders who are very elaborately constrained to prevent them from exercising
authority or using their influence to acquire wealth or prestige.12 A Hadza camp
at any particular time is often known by the name of a well-known man then
living in it. But this
indicates only that the man is well enough known for his name to be a useful
label, and not that he acts as either a leader or a representative of the camp
(Woodburn 1968b: 105). Hadza decisions are essentially individual ones: even
when matters such as the timing of a camp move or the choice of a new site are to
be decided, there are no leaders whose responsibility it is to take the decisions or
to guide people towards some general agreement. Sporadic discussion about
moving does occur but usually it takes the form of announcements by some
individual men that they are going to move and where they are going to move to.
Other men will often defer a decision about whether to stay, whether to
accompany those who are moving, or whether to move elsewhere, until the
move actually begins."
(http://libcom.org/files/EGALITARIAN%20SOCIETIES%20-%20James%20Woodburn.pdf)

Conclusion

"These are, of course, not the only contexts in which equality is expressed and
levelling mechanisms operate: to do justice to the subject it would be necessary
to go much further and in particular to explore the expression of egalitarianism
in religious belief and practice. But I think I have said enough to show that we
have here the application of a rigorously systematic principle: in these societies
the ability of individuals to attach and to detach themselves at will from
groupings and from relationships, to resist the imposition of authority by
force, to use resources freely without reference to other people, to share as
equals in game meat brought into camp, to obtain personal possessions
without entering into dependent relationships-all these bring about one central
aspect of this specific ibrm of egalitarianism. What it above all does is to disengage
people from property, from the potentiality in property rights for creating dependency. I
think it is probable that this specialised development can only be realised without
impoverishment in societies with a simple hunting and gathering economy
because elsewhere this degree of disengagement from property would damage
the operation of the economy. Indeed the indications are that this development is
intrinsic, a necessary component of immediate-return economies which occurs
only in such economies.

...

There equality does
not have to be earned or displayed, in fact should not be displayed, but is
intrinsically present as an entitlement of all men. There are no casualties of the
principle of equality among the Hadza13 or the !Kung, none of whose moral
worth is destroyed by poor economic performance or lack of personal
competitiveness. Egalitarianism is asserted as an automatic entitlement which
does not have to be validated."
(http://libcom.org/files/EGALITARIAN%20SOCIETIES%20-%20James%20Woodburn.pdf)